From the mountain road where we saw a spectacular view of the Amarnath Yatra camps below, we descended down as we drove towards Sonmarg. The descent was slow since there was a traffic jam.
When we reached Sonmarg, we stopped right before the J&K tourist bungalows. It looked charming. The bungalows were a hundred feet away from the main main road, surrounded by a well maintained lawn. There were some bungalows that enjoyed a quiet privacy, higher up the hilly area behind the main buildings. We found a hotel room opposite this. We had the good fortune of viewing the charming J&K bungalows though we couldn’t occupy one of those.
Soon after lunch, I set off to explore the place while parents stayed back in the room. A young lad was my tour guide. The Thajiwas glacier was the chief tourist spot in Sonmarg and we started walking towards it on a never ending cross country trail through hillside meadows. As the climb started I kept turning back and looking down at the settlement of Sonmarg with the hills in the background.
It was a beautiful walk offering simple visual delights and I was free to take as many pictures as I wished. A cluster of white flowers, a carpet of fresh green glistening leaves contrasting with the bottle green and matte finish of the Devdars in the backdrop, shanties nestled in the slopes far away, village kids, a patch of ground that looks like smudged painting, the curious sight of a lone and remote cottage on the slopes with red upturned tables before it, a vast spread of grazing sheep all the way till that faraway mound, tents of grey and blue tarpaulin, a dozen people on ponies, boys playing cricket on a field that looks strangely level, a silver Wagon R parked some distance away…
My field of view was then filled with a craggy snow covered mountain. We walked some more and saw cars parked, people, makeshift shops, some locals, tourists…
There was a stream, we crossed a bridge, beyond which there was silence again. We walked some more, didn’t reach the snout of the glacier, but turned around when it started getting dark and foggy…
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